This is, obviously, a very solid setup for a murder mystery, and the show, to its credit, has a really good instinct for when to drop the next clue, twist, or reveal, which is usually just as attention is beginning to wane. And, as the title implies, one of them is lying about what happened. The hook is that Simon was in the room with four other students – straight-A teacher’s pet Bronwyn (Marianly Tejada), closeted star athlete Cooper (Chibuikem Uche), unfaithful cheerleader mean girl Addy (Annalisa Cochrane), and bad boy drug dealer Nate (Cooper van Grootel). It’s watchable, for sure, but that’s partly on the strength of the case, which finds misanthropic gossipmonger Simon (Mark McKenna) dying of an allergic reaction in detention right before he’s due to disseminate a treasure trove of secrets on his blog, About That. Based on a book by Karen McManus that combined The Breakfast Club with an Agatha Christie locked-room whodunit and a keen sense of how teenagers might act and behave, this eight-episode series, which began as a Peacock original and is now rather mysteriously a Netflix one, manages to replicate the broad strokes of the mystery without transplanting any of the depth. One of Us Is Lying doesn’t break the fourth wall or get particularly meta, but it’s clearly aware of the innumerable other shows just like it.
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